A web application (also known as a “web app” or “webapp”) is an application that is accessible over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. A web application may be hosted in a browser-controlled environment or coded in a browser-supported language and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable. Web applications are becoming popular due to the prevalence of web browsers, and the convenience of using a web browser as a client. The ability to update and maintain web applications without distributing and installing software on potentially thousands of client computers is one reason for their popularity, as is the inherent support for cross-platform compatibility. Examples of web applications include some blogs, webmail, online retail sales, online auctions, wikis and many other functions.
Webapp development software currently exists that may be used to develop a web application, such as Joomla!® developed by the Joomla Project Team (used to develop websites), and WordPress® (used to develop web blogs). Furthermore, publication tools exist that support the publishing of web applications developed by such webapp development software. However, current publication tools are not capable of automatically determining the underlying webapp development application used to develop the web application, and as such, is unaware of application-specific settings that have to be applied to the web application to enable publication. As a result, the publication tool cannot publish the web application to a remote server. Typically, a user of the publication tool has to manually edit files of the web application to place it in condition to be published by the publication tool.